Fudcon India@pune

Day-1

It all started with inauguration ceremony by COEP director at around 10:00 AM. The next was keynote session by fedora project lead Jared Smith explaining how fedora started for him, what he expects from the community and giving insights on what exactly fedora is, with emphasis on contributing at various levels. Then was three different talks but i choose to attend talk by our very dear rtnpro on Transifix an open source translation platform :https://www.transifex.net/start/ . After a very long talk by rtnpro, i with other fedora community folks went for some lunch and socializing with community to which we only knew before on IRC’s from there nicks and it was a damn good experience to hangout with them. After the lunch i headed to Fedora web of trust talk by Heherson Pagcaliwagan but couldn’t concentrate much because was stuck with my netbook wifi drivers  for fedora 15 running on it. Then was satya’s talk on Drools(Jboss) , which i wanted to attend but it was conflicting with Joerg Simmon’s on Fedora Security Lab and the OSSTMM, which i went for in the end. I was bit fascinated with kital’s talk on security spin and OSSTMM, because the context of security which i had in mind, it completely blew it away and then it gave me much more insights of it at a different level. After the talk i had a small conversation with kital on how OSSTMM helps as far as security is concerned at the code level itself and how we can drill down to things  in a much statical way. Took the OSSTMM iso and few pdf’s from him to give it a shot and try and implement things at my current work scenario.

Day-2

The day-2 started out bit late for me, missed the Thoughts about community talk by Harish Pillay. And then were series of talks on various other stuff but was more looking forward towards the once related to system management and security. The first talk i attended was on Security in the Open Source world! by Huzaifa Sidhpurwala, Eugene Teo. Next talk attended and loved was on GlusterFS : Hacking-HOWTO by Amar Tumballi, he explained how GlusterFS is  scale-out NAS file system and its advantages over other distributed file systems. Next talk i was looking forward too was of Zarafa(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarafa_%28software%29) in Fedora by Robert Scheck, had a discussion with robert on zarafa memory and cpu allocation issues and how stable it is now. After that attended the talk by Amit Shah on The Latest in Linux Virtualization but was bit late for the talk due to long  discussion with robert on zarafa stability, so couldn’t catch the talk well. Then was the talk which i was very excited about because am using puppet and lot other configuration and service management tool for my work, the talk on system automation using chef by Ranjib Dey, which went pretty well. Later Jared Smith gave an awesome talk on “Writing Technical Documentation with DocBook and Publican” , he used kushal’s python for you and me book for his reference and demos, and the talk rocked. Then was the time for talk by Venkat Krishna on  “RHQ – An open source system management suite”, which i liked and will test its deployment soon. All the talks were over by around 6:00 Pm and it was time for FUDPUB for which everyone was charged up. Me along with other attendees and COEP volunteers went for FUDPUB and had a great time there with rocking music , drinks and food.

Day-3

The third day was the day for Hackfests and i was looking forward towards hackfests on Security spin/packaging and Puppet. Could not attend the puppet workshop because of time constraints. I started out with Kital and Robert and lot of students who turned up for the packaging hackfest which turned into a packaging workshop finally. Started out with packaging a software called TCT which is a tools for analyzing a system after a break-in and SDD for fedora. After some time me with other  attendees and volunteers went for some pizza grabbing for lunch. Will be soon sending SDD for review and TCT requires some patching of makefile, which i will have to discuss with its upstream and Robert. The day finally ended with having some good dinner with kishan and rtnpro.

Spell Bee concept application

24 july 2010

Since few days me and kishan is working on a project/idea named spell bee[1]( named just for reference of topic, name yet to be decided). We are basically trying to develop a desktop game application based on the popular “spelling bee” game/quiz.

A ‘Spelling Bee’ is a game in which a user listens to a spoken word and tries to spell that word correctly. Spelling Bees are conducted across the globe and are widely popular. We intend to bring this game to the desktop, i.e. to develop an application which would allow one or more users to play the game on their pc, basically Spelling Bee is an immensely popular and successful concept. Having a
desktop application based on the same would be a fun, yet learning experience, especially for children.

We will be using Programming Language: Python
Interface Design: PyGtk

Database: Sqlite3
Text-to-Speech: Festival(tested)/espeak( to be tested)

A look at the app. from user’s view :

The player will have a choice to select a proper difficulty level, based on age groups OR class. The game would consist of the player (pressing a button) to listen to the word being spoken( using the TTS)
and would have to key in the correct spelling. The game is declared “over” when the player gets 3 incorrect spellings. There would be a constant score-display to the player and at the end of the game, if a new “High Score” has been achieved, the played would be asked to fill up his/her name and Records would be maintained. The user can chose to “Play Again” or exit.

As of now, we have not thought about any other language. Once we get the app working in English, we could look into the possibility of extending it to other language.

I will be updating more in details as we proceed. Till then cheers 🙂

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_bee

FAD@PUNE REDHAT

DAY-0 28 MAY 2010

It all started from our journying from durgapur to kolkata to catch our flight, which was destined to go at 5:30PM. We(me, kishan, meejan) started from durgapur at around 10:00AM. Everything was going fine and we were having loads of fun, with few disscussions on packaging. We reached kolkata on time, after which kishan had to go to his uncle’s place to take his identity proof for boarding the flight. Me and meejan grabed some lunch at KFC and then collectively we all went to airport. Our flight was delayed for about an hour or so :(. Kishan and meejan were having damn excitment as it was their first flight with butterflies in stomach too :P, Kishan’s face was a treat to watch when plane took off from kolkata airport. We boarded the spicejet flight and travelled almost half of india on our way to pune as it was a damn long flight i.e from kolkata to Delhi and then to pune. We reached pune at around 12:00PM and were picked up by sankarshan(Thanks :)). We went to the guest house which was arranged by REDHAT people for our stay. At the guest house we found kushaldas(Thanks :)) too who along with sankarshan helped us in reaching our rooms. The place was cozy and cool and we were told to reach REDHAT office at 9:00AM tomorrow morning i.e on 29th. We found rtnpro there too, who reached before us as he had an early flight. As we were damn tired, we all went to sleep.

DAY-1 29 MAY 2010

It started with meeting shrink, mether and variour other Redhat and Fedora people. The only sessions of the day was on autotools by Siddhesh. The session was pretty much informative and interactive, Siddhesh went into explaining how Makefile and Configure files are automatically generated from Makefile.am and configure.ac with his linkc program. The first day i spent taking few bugs fixing and packaging tips from rakesh, who was fixing security bugs. I spent my time looking into details of packaging, following the packaging documentation in fedora wiki.

At the lunch time, people from Bhasha Technologies who came to meet the Fedora ARM contributes had small conversation with us on their various projects. I along with Salim, kishan decided to work on suggested projects. The day finished off and we(me, kishan, meejan, Ankur) went to have dinner with kushal and mether. After having lunch we headed to kushal’s and mether’s place were we had loads of fun playing Wii.

DAY-2 30 may 2010

I started the day with packaging openEMR for fedora-medical, as listed by susmit on mailing list. The talk of the day, i was looking for was of sayamindu, who gave a talk on OLPC as a downstream of Fedora project. Meanwhile i packaged openEMR. At the end of the day we had disscussions on more upcoming FAD’s and FUDCON in india(disscussion will continue).

At night we(I, kishan, meejan, rtnpro, ankur) along with kushal, mether and salim went to Hakka for a nice chinese dinner. Again at the end we went to kushal’s place to play on Wii(i played boxing and my hand is still paining 😦 )

Man page for transmision-remote-cli

I was working on writting a man page for transmission-remote-cli, it is a console client for the BitTorrent client. I tested it on my system and it worked great for me. The pod file can be found at http://yevlempy.fedorapeople.org/transmission-remote-cli.pod , while writting the man page i came through a very interesting way of writting the man page, the format i meant, which can be found at http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/pod2man-a-great-way-to-write-unix-man-pages/ . More details about transmission-remote-cli can be found at http://github.com/fagga/transmission-remote-cli/blob/master/README.md. Then i integrated the man page to the spec file , which i have filed  in bugzilla against transmission-remote-cli.

THE SUGAR FONT PANEL

As i mentioned few days before in my blog about the sugar font panel i was making, is done and would like to disscuss the technical stuffs related to it and the proccess of its turning it on. It all started with playing of the codes which i got from (http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar/repos/mainline/trees/master/extensions/cpsection) , i started with codes of frame (one of sugar control panel extension for changing the frame view etc). First of all i set the development environment hoping into(http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Jhbuild).

Basically we need four files to make a control panel extension for sugar i.e Makefile.am, view.py, model.py, _init_.py, in the process of building two more files Makefile.in and Makefile gets generated. Then you need to place you extensions icon in sugar/data/icon directory.

Other than that you need to git add the icon of the extension by git add data/icons/<iconname> in my case it was git add format-text-size.svg. After doing all these stuff you need to edit few more files which i will be explaining with screenshots.

The first one is editting the Makefile.am in data/icon directory.

Then you need to edit configure.ac in source/sugar directory by extensions/cpsection/<extension name>/Makefile

You also need to edit Makefile.am in sugar/extensions/cpsection.

Finally all edits are done and now there are few basic commands you need to go through it.

-./autogen.sh –prefix=/home/yevelempy/sugar-jhbuild/install

-make install

Every time you change the codes of  Model.py, view.py or _init_.py, you need to run “Make install” inside sugar-jhbuild/source/sugar and if you change configure.ac or any Makefile.am files you need to run autogen.sh.Finally things were over and i could my icon showing up and i was happy but now came the original fun 😉

I started just by copying codes of frame panel with few bit of changes and results were awsome :P, The original mockup which was like .

was looking something like(below) this in the beginning after my cutting and pasting of codes.

Then the results started improving a bit as i digged depper into python and pygtk stuff(although i was lazy and took time to get the stuff done and still lot needs to be done). The later results were on path of improvement

And then

Finally things came down to

Now came the issue of inserting labels and marks as you can see in original mockup, ” | ”  and labels like Default, Small, Large etc. With the help of folks from #sugar i could get up to the exact function which turned up as a magic wand ” self._font_size_slider.add_mark(co-ordinates,gtk.POS_BOTTOM,_(‘Label name’))” . Now i could get things upto

And finally things scalled down to the original mockup. You need to run the gconftool -2 command to set the gconf values and see the changes, the command goes like “gconftool -2  –get  /desktop/sugar/font/font_size” in my case. Now you will get your desired thngs done. Although there are few points which still needs to be read and done pretty well.

My codes can be found at ” http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar/repos/yevlempy/commits/973b0bd9def313cf6cf9ffea967c4626ebb9ffc6 “. Will be updating on my later improvements. yo !!

FUDcon planning india 2010

The Fedora Users and Developers Conference or FUDCon is back and this time we are planning it to be held in India. For those of you who are not aware of it, FUDCon is a massive international conference that takes place in different parts of the world and brings together Fedora users and developers from various parts of the world to interact together to give something back to the Linux community. Commonly, FUDCons area a combination of barcamp style conferences, FUDPub or a social event, hackfests etc.

Events like FUDCon are a major help to all users and developers and users, especially new ones. The exposure and help that is available in these conferences is truly amazing and there are very few greater opportunity of learning from seasoned developers. The ideas and tips that are received during these sessions result in a quality of work that is much higher that work done at homes or separately.

The potential venue for FUDCon 2010 is either Bangalore or Pune with Pune getting preference because of consideration of costs of hosting the event and the possible availability of SICSR, Pune as a venue, where gnunify.in was recently held. Since the preparation for such a massive event is bound to take quite some time, the dates of the event are tentatively set for sometime in the months of October or November, although dates are still to decided.

However, in order to host such a huge event, we need all the help that we can possibly get. Here is where the rest of you come in. This is a direct request to all the LUGs all over India. We need all the help we can get and therefore are appealing to you to come forward and help. All those people who would be willing to help in the organisation of the event as volunteers are invited to join us.

Font panel extension for sugar

27.02.2010

Lately i am working on font panel extension for sugar control panel. Had loads of pygtk documentation and it still is going on. Have not been blogging since a long time, was quite busy with this font panel stuff which is to be included in 0.90 version. Almost it has been complete with few bits to tweak upon for finalising. Will be blogging with whole lot of documentation and various screen shots of my project advancement. As for now working with sugar folks is complete fun and specially unmanindu and erikos has been helping a lot with lots of stuff. After i am done with it, will be posting the complete process of its advancement. Till then “stay cool stay foolish” 😉

Chicken Pox blues!!!

11.02.2010

Since these days i was suffering from chicken pox and was really very much in pain. I was in so much pain and was so weak that i could not even speak nicely for few days. It really drove me nuts for around three weeks. But on the contrary it also gave me some time to go through the pygtk documentation and refrence which before i was using in my codes just by taking refrence from the documentation.

But now i am recovering quite well, although i have grown very very weak 😦 . But now i have got quite good base for pygtk which will help in sugarlabs project. Currently i am focusing and concentrating my energy for some good work 🙂 .

GSOC 2010 IS ON

29.01.2010

As declared by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager – Open Source Google Inc on 27th january 2010 that GSOC 2010 will be there. The various information can be found at links

1) http://socghop.appspot.com/

2)http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2009/faqs

3)http://delicious.com/gsoc2009

4)http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2009

The accepting application for would-be mentoring organizations will be beginning March 8th at approximately 19:00 UTC, with applications closing on March 12th at 23:00 UTC and Students can apply between 19:00 UTC on March 29th to 19:00 UTC on April 9th.

I to will be applying for GSOC 2010 from none other than (in which i always wanted to work 🙂 )  SugarLabs. It was always on my mind that someday i will be working for sugarlabs and not i am very happy working on font panel extension for control panel in sugar. Will updayte with a documentation on how i worked for the font panel extension 🙂

SUGAR JOURNEY

21.01.2010

The first and foremost task for playing with sugar is obviously installing it and that can be done by “yum groupinstall sugar-desktop” and then you can have fun playing with it. If you are going for development then you need to follow “http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Jhbuild&#8221; . Today i am going through the various control-panel settings and codes for sugar “http://git.sugarlabs.org/projects/sugar/repos/mainline/trees/master/extensions/cpsection&#8221; . I also wrote a small code for font panel with the help of gnome documentations

#!/usr/bin/env python

import pygtk
pygtk.require(‘2.0’)
import gtk

class FontButtonExample:
def __init__(self):
window = gtk.Window()
window.connect(‘destroy’, lambda w: gtk.main_quit())
vbox = gtk.VBox()
window.add(vbox)
hbox = gtk.HBox()
vbox.pack_start(hbox, False)
label = gtk.Label(‘Current Font:’)
hbox.pack_start(label, False)
fontbutton = gtk.FontButton(‘Monospace Italic 14’)
fontbutton.set_use_font(True)
fontbutton.set_title(‘Select a font’)
fontbutton.connect(‘font-set’, self.font_set_cb)
hbox.pack_start(fontbutton)
self.fontbutton = fontbutton
bbox = gtk.HButtonBox()
vbox.pack_start(bbox, False)
b = gtk.ToggleButton(”, False)
b.connect(‘toggled’, self.use_font_cb)
b.set_active(True)
bbox.pack_start(b)
b = gtk.ToggleButton(”, False)
b.connect(‘toggled’, self.use_size_cb)
b.set_active(False)
bbox.pack_start(b)
b = gtk.ToggleButton(”, False)
b.connect(‘toggled’, self.show_style_cb)
b.set_active(True)
bbox.pack_start(b)
b = gtk.ToggleButton(”, False)
b.connect(‘toggled’,  self.show_size_cb)
b.set_active(True)
bbox.pack_start(b)
window.show_all()
return
def use_font_cb(self, togglebutton):
self.fontbutton.set_use_font(togglebutton.get_active())
return
def use_size_cb(self, togglebutton):
self.fontbutton.set_use_size(togglebutton.get_active())
return
def show_style_cb(self, togglebutton):
self.fontbutton.set_show_style(togglebutton.get_active())
return
def show_size_cb(self, togglebutton):
self.fontbutton.set_show_size(togglebutton.get_active())
return
def font_set_cb(self, fontbutton):
font = fontbutton.get_font_name()
print ‘You have selected the font:’, font
return

def main():
gtk.main()

if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
cbe = FontButtonExample()
main()

I also went through writting Makefile for font-panel and the __init__.py files. Need to concentrate on coding after the design is fixed i.e will be done by saturday in the meeting (design will be fixed). Got good feedback on designs i proposed for the font-panels. Looking forward on working things out.